Transcribe!

Making a Transcribe file

This is just a brief discussion of what musicians do with Transcribe, how they can share they can share their Transcribe documents, and the benefits in that. You can skip this section and jump ahead to the section on installing keystrokes and using transcribe.

Transcribe allows musicians and music teachers to create collections of markers for sections and measure for any audio recording or video. Eventually you may want to create your own transcribe resources. I encourage you to do so because you can create great tools for self-study and learning by ear ... and you can share them with others who may want to learn the same song. Additionally, months or years after leaning a song, should you ever choose to go back to review or double check the accuracy of a section, it’s all marked out, easy to locate, and a breeze to review.

But for now , instead of creating your own Transcribe resources, get familiar with Transcribe by using the tools I’ve created. This will probably motivate you to learn to create transcribe files for studying music on your own. Just know in advance, when you do choose to work with Transcribe, it’s fairly easy to add measure markers for a whole song.

Marking each the main sections of the song (e.g. intro, verse, chorus, solo, verse, chorus, solo, chorus, outro) can prove extremely helpful learning or practicing a song. As Transcribe plays the audio you tap the ‘s’ key to mark a section. (As a ‘best practice’ I do recommend marking sections with the ‘s’ key You can also enter markers with the the ‘m’ key, but strictly speaking that’s for marking measures, not sections.) You can add as many measure markers as you want (and once you’ve done so, Transcribe can automatically show you were the beats probably are.)

Entering measures is just like adding sections marks. As Transcribe plays your recording, just tap the ‘m’ key. So, for a three minute song, it takes a mere three minutes to enter measure markers. Sound too good to be true. Well, sorta. Here’s a word of advice.

You probably don’t want to add measure markers at points where you already have section markers. Section markers double as measure markers, so you don’t need or want additional measure markers at those locations — they mess up you ability to move around easily.

After a tap-entry session, your marker positions will be close to the desired beats, but not exactly on target. However, after tap-entering, you can perfect the location of marks by dragging them to they’re intended position . once perfected, each measure will play in a perfectly smooth loop. Moral of the story: Tap entering is easy. Perfecting all measure markers usually takes me between 30 and 60 minutes for a 3 minute song, and that after you’re good at it.

You may choose to start creating your own markers or not. Whatever the case, for now, try using my resources to get started.